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In the 30 years since Marrugeku’s humble beginnings, artistic directors Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain have forged one of Australia’s most significant dance companies. By Jana Perković.

Artistic directors Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain on the success of Marrugeku

Marrugeku artistic directors Dalisa Pigram (left) and Rachael Swain.

Credit: Philip Thompson / Marrugeku

Marrugeku started unusually. In 1994, dancer and choreographer Michael Leslie (Gamilaroi/Mandandanji) approached Stalker, a Sydney-based physical theatre company internationally renowned for stilt acrobatics and dancing, with an unexpected proposition: would they be interested in interpreting a story from Aboriginal rock art?

Leslie – a towering figure in Australian theatre, often credited with a key role in developing contemporary Aboriginal dance – had lived in Arnhem Land and built community connections in the town of Kunbarlanja. He wanted to bring to life the traditional culture of the local Kunwinjku people: in particular, the story of the long-limbed, tall Mimi spirits, who live inside rock and come out at night to hunt and dance.

Unlike the nearby Yirrkala, home to Yothu Yindi and the Bangarra Dance Company’s work, Kunbarlanja was a rough, poor border town, reaping no profits from the nearby Kakadu National Park. Tourism brought only easy access to art buyers and alcohol.

When Rachael Swain and Emily McCormick, another member of Stalker, travelled to Kunbarlanja with Leslie and composer Matthew Fargher to meet the Traditional Owners and seek permission to tell the story, the whole project must have felt daunting. At the time, Swain notes in the 2021 book about the company, “there was no real road map for these Indigenous-intercultural exchanges of artistic and cultural experience”.

Stalker was an urban theatre company, Swain herself a pākehā from New Zealand with a degree from DasArts performance school in Amsterdam, steeped in the European tradition of political theatre. No members of the company were Aboriginal. In practical terms, there were no laptops or mobile phones, not even landlines – “just one phone booth under the banyan tree”.

And so there they are, in 1994 in Kunbarlanja. It is a dry, dusty afternoon, and Swain and McCormick are sitting on the street with the Traditional Owners. “We have chatted about the Mimis and their home in the ‘rocky country’ and have offered the idea of making a dance/story about the Mimis”, Swain wrote, “but are receiving rather blank stares along with the tentative nods.”

Swain and McCormick make a quick decision: they put on their stilts and start walking around. “Our long-limbed strides and gallops, turns and wobbles down the main street are met with a great deal of shouting and loud animated talk in Kunwinjku. Laughter, yelling, children running and crying and finally a lot of singing out in English: we look like those cheeky Mimis.”

It’s a breakthrough – and a humble beginning of what became one of Australia’s most consequential intercultural performance companies. The process of demonstration, exchange and dialogue became a key part of their process, the basis for Mimi (1996). During the development of the show, one of the key performers, the 18-year-old Dalisa Pigram (Yawuru/Bardi), joined the newly formed Marrugeku.

Mimi premiered at Perth Festival in 1996 and then took to Arnhem Land in a convoy of four-wheel drive troupe carriers and trucks – perhaps the first such large-scale theatre production to tour Australia’s remote communities. Pigram and Swain became co-artistic directors in 2008 and Marrugeku fully separated from Stalker in 2016. This year, they celebrate 30 years of continuous practice.

Stalker was an “acrobatic tour de force”, says Dutch producer Henk Keizer, but Marrugeku was on another level entirely. Keizer, an old friend and collaborator of Swain’s, had just become managing director of Oerol Festival, one of the leading festivals in the Netherlands. “We booked [Mimi] and it was an incredible success.” Very quickly, he tells me, Marrugeku “developed into a leading Indigenous dance theatre company, with a complete, own, artistic language”.

“We were brought together by my dance teacher, Michael Leslie, who had the vision, and I’m grateful for that,” Pigram muses from Broome – Marrugeku is now based between Broome and Sydney, where Swain lives with her family. Many of their meetings, like this one, happen on Zoom. “I’m also feeling a lot of sadness that the Elders that we had the utmost privilege to sit alongside in those foundational moments are no longer with us.”

A month earlier, Swain and Pigram went back to Kunbarlanja to reconnect with the community and find a way to celebrate the anniversary. They describe it as bittersweet – “hard and sad and joyful – there’s also pride but lots of grief”. The social issues persist, they say. “When you work like this, it’s not in an objective, outside way – you live it, you live what reconciliation is and isn’t. You live the problematics of it, the challenge of it, and you are connected to people: a small group of a larger group of a larger group, of a big matrix of humans.” Swain adds: “It’s a very visceral emotion.”

Marrugeku married the deeply place-embedded First Nations storytelling with the specific 1990s aesthetic of outdoor, site-specific theatre. Its “devising” approach, in which artists from various lineages and training traditions come into one room and build scenes using structured improvisation, also played a role, as did new approaches at intercultural collaboration, which attempted a more thoughtful, equitable exchange. Italian director and author Eugenio Barba’s concept of “barter”, a process of performing for each other, was one practice that early Marrugeku used – this is what took place on that afternoon in 1994.

Today, Swain is less sure about barter, but Pigram is sanguine about its role in the company’s toolbox, which still revolves around people bringing their skills and strengths to the table “to find the right languages – the embodied languages, visual languages – everything we need to communicate with each other, and then to the audiences”.

“To uncover the story, or hide the story,” Pigram says. “Not just to hold what others give but to contribute to it and for it to be valued – whether you’re an 18-year-old coming out of training or an established artist.”

“Their ability to work with difference – not to overcome difference but to make something where all the differences can co-exist together – is very unique,” says Hildegard de Vuyst, a Belgian dramaturg who has worked with Marrugeku for more than 15 years. Then she adds, admiringly: “What I love about Rachael: she’s always introducing herself with ‘I’m a settler artist’.”

The love is mutual: in the “big matrix of humans” that Marrugeku works with stretching across the globe, Belgium features large. “It is a country with a deep and terrible colonial history,” Swain says. “There are people from many places living there, negotiating what it means to be there now.” The influence of companies such as les ballets C de la B is unmistakeable in Marrugeku’s work and it’s not a surprise to find out that three C de la B alumni (de Vuyst included) have been key collaborators.

The work they are now developing is an Indigenous perspective on speculative futurism, “post a lot of things”. Pigram describes a work about “the complexities of weather patterns changing and climate and the power of working from Country, as in the oldest ancestor for us Indigenous people – and what that means for the very, very far in the future time, and time in itself. We were inspired by something Patrick Dodson (Yawuru) said to us – that ‘the freedom of artists is to absorb themselves in a futuristic space and to give it some character and manifestation’.”

“Their starting points are always so wild, so huge,” says de Vuyst. “The scale [of Aboriginal Australia]: not just the geographical scale but the time scale – 65,000 years. We study the Greeks and the Egyptians, which is what, 3000 years? It’s peanuts, nothing, compared to that scale. And that is something you can gradually start to comprehend with your Western upbringing.”

Marrugeku’s deftness with blending art forms, modes and themes reaches its crescendo in Jurrungu Ngan-ga (Straight Talk) (2021). It’s a video-heavy dance performance animated by a memoir of life in Australia’s offshore detention centres, in which Aboriginal dancing is infused with vogueing and krump. Performer Luke Currie-Richardson raps a spirited reimagining of Childish Gambino’s “This is America” written by Noongar rapper Beni Bjar. The powerful rap was released on YouTube as “This is Australia”, where it went viral.

“It was not to be popular, it was for a reason,” says Pigram of a dramaturgical decision born out of conversations with Patrick Dodson. “It’s to give voice and platform to the kinds of things experienced by marginalised communities. To make sure [the message of the performance] isn’t just received by people who can afford an expensive ticket to the theatre.”

Dodson, who works as a cultural dramaturg on all Marrugeku productions, is a Yawuru cultural leader, activist and former senator. This too, Angela Conquet notes, is unusual. Conquet, a French-Australian dance curator and programmer, invited Marrugeku to bring their practice to Lyon’s Biennale de la danse earlier this year, and they came with a large group of people. “They said ‘this is our family’ and I understood it to mean [their] extended artistic community. But they came with [Bunuba woman] June Oscar, who is a cultural leader and an academic, and also someone who guides their processes. It exemplified what it means when we say ‘being in relation’ to others: Marrugeku’s is practice understood as ‘culture’ and ‘place’. Your family comes from place, and place is indissociable from your practice.”

The longer I listen, the more I understand something Swain and Pigram told me at the beginning: that Marrugeku’s work is always about Makarrata. A Yolŋu word for “Treaty”, popularised by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the word has a deeper cultural meaning: of reconciliation to heal conflicts from the past. The word has been there, in Australian politics, since at least the 1970s, Swain points out: “It’s been intrinsic to our practice – so that our interculturalism has a purpose. It’s not just, like, ‘these things look cool together’. It’s the work of coming together after a struggle. That listening to each other, and collaborating, has a purpose.

“As we’ve worked together over long difficult periods, we’ve had to work some big questions out. That strengthens me. There’s an understanding that our difference is important, and the different opinions and approaches are important.”

“It’s hard work that you need hope and trust and patience for,” Pigram chimes in. “It’s not surface work. It’s like family – and I don’t say this lightly. They’re not just collaborators anymore – they’ve shared parts of themselves and their lives and cultural perspectives and their spirit with us. You can’t devalue that after making the connection ... So it’s truly doing the work of Makarrata, what people think of as ‘reconciling’. There is a meaningful connection at hand and you’re working out how to keep it meaningful. You’re not just giving up and throwing it away and then starting something new over this side. It’s… it’s…” she stops and breathes in. “It’s hard work.”

When in the midst of a conflict, Pigram says, they have learnt to have trust in each other and have patience for another “to get there – because the ‘there’ is really, really important. And the journey is long.”

As Swain writes in the company monograph, Marrugeku was born out of a continuous experiment “in dance, music and visual art as well as in ways of being in and knowing the world”. “Who was to know, as we sat down in the dirt together to work it all out through the making of Mimi, that Marrugeku would become a platform for learning through trans-Indigenous and intercultural artistic processes” – continuously, for the better part of these artists’ lives.

Looking back on the past 30 years, Swain tells me, she has learnt just how important it is to know what you don’t know.

“I thought I knew more,” she says. “I mean, I knew I didn’t know how to do what we were going to do, because it didn’t exist yet. But [how important it is] to just sit back and listen more. It’s probably what I still need to do, every single day.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 29, 2025 as "Country dance".

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